ShoreTel Seeing Strong Adoption of its UC Systems in Education Sector

ShoreTel, a provider of IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications, has established itself in providing educational institutions with an advanced communication system that facilitates classroom teaching and administration while lowering telecommunications costs.

A few of ShoreTel’s (News - Alert) deployments in the education sector include the Amarillo ISD in Texas, the Perkiomen Valley School District in Pennsylvania, Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, and the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, Texas.

With current economy slowdown, school district budgets are tighter across the country, adding pressure to reduce costs. But lowering costs without cutting educational programs requires taking a hard look at reducing infrastructure and administrative costs.

According to a company press release, the ShoreTel UC system helps schools to reduce the number of required phone lines that schools pays for, and also by eliminating costly charges for having consultants perform moves, adds and changes (MACs). Also, The ShoreTel system is qualified under E-rate, which allows schools to acquire productivity-boosting UC systems when budgets are tight.

Amarillo ISD has 53 campuses and two other facilities, thus it needed an easy-to-manage communications system to connect the district. The ShoreTel UC system will provide a single receptionist for the entire district, improving call management, while the ability to perform MACs in-house reducing the administration costs.

In the release, Gary Allen, CTO, Amarillo ISD, said "The ShoreTel UC system has brought communications sanity to our large and geographically distributed school district. It's extremely reliable and easy to use and administer, which has significantly reduced our ongoing costs. And integration with Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook has enabled us to introduce new capabilities that make it much easier for our teachers to communicate with parents, administrators and other teachers."

The Perkiomen Valley School District serves about 5,800 students and is facing rising costs and problems related to its hosted Cisco (News - Alert) voice over IP (VoIP) system. With the ShoreTel UC system, the district has estimated it is saving approximately 75 percent of the cost of the hosted system.

Mike Balik, IT Manager, Perkiomen Valley School District, said "The ShoreTel UC system is not something I spend very much of my day on, and that peace of mind is very important. The system is always up and running and that has meant many other intangible benefits, such as time savings, increased efficiency and faster responses. The schools can always get a call in or out  for a public education service like ours, this level of continuity is vital."

Sinclair Community College, Dayton, Ohio, also opted for ShoreTel UC system. With its current PBX (News - Alert) system no longer supported by the previous vendor, the college needed a platform to improve communications between students and faculty and support a call center that can reach 20,000 calls a month.

Spring Branch ISD, Houston, Texas selected ShoreTel UC system for ease of use and management, the resilience of its distributed architecture, and the system's communications features.